It is with a sense of sadness and hope for the future that FaithandHeritage.com will cease publishing articles. All good things come to an end, and we believe F&H has served its purpose. The site will remain up indefinitely as an archive of the best Christian and truly pro-Western thought.

Since its launch in 2011, FaithandHeritage.com has been the preeminent Christian-worldview-based defender of Western civilization and peoples in a world gone mad. We have been encouraged in the meantime by the movement behind Donald Trump and the rise of a comprehensive alternative media ecosystem. The blossoming of thousands of blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc, has completely changed the game. Our enemies have no hope of keeping our people permanently in their mental prison. The tools of liberation are there; those who seek shall find.

From the beginning, the purpose of F&H was to provide a robust theological defense of what people considered common sense 100 years ago. Our society has moved so fast down the slope of progressivism that few explicit historical defenses were available to us to defeat Marxist church infiltrators. The writers at F&H took up that challenge and the reference articles we produced in its first five years remain some of the best in existence at helping young Christians reconcile the righteous forms of ethnonationalism with the historical Christian faith. No matter how left-wing the churches become, the testimony of the Bible and history will stand to impeach them, and we know with absolute faith that somehow, somewhere, someday Christ’s Church will be liberated from its current Marxist captivity.

Until that time, we wish our brothers and sisters in Christ the best as they seek to raise their families in goodness and truth in this dark age. May the next generation fulfill their destiny as a rising dawn for truth and righteousness.

I remember how this text struck me as I read it for the first time as a young boy in South Africa just as talks of white property confiscation began many years ago. In my particular case, my first thought was: what if the government takes everything and leaves us out on the street? How will we pay for food? How will we eat?

These questions have come back to haunt me with increased intensity now that I’ve become a father. If there’s one thing I can fathom that’s worse than starvation, it would be to see my little children starve to death in front of me.

Then there’s Proverbs 10:3, a text the Holy Spirit keeps bringing me back to, and the many, many other promises of God. In particular the Psalms assure us not only of His care and love for us, but also attest that He will destroy our enemies and remove the obstacles to prosperity in our path. If we repent, we know that God will make His promises come true, and we can always rest in the fact that He, the Almighty, makes all things work together for our good (Rom. 8:28).

The same applies to our people. I know that, if we as a nation and a race repent and seek God’s Kingdom first, He has a glorious future in store for us. We must just let go of our idols and put all of our hope and trust in Him.

Mit Brennender Sorge, translated as With Burning Concern, is a 1937 encyclical published by the Italian Pope Pius XI. Published in German, the pope expresses his concerns regarding the policies of Hitler’s party in Germany.

It is addressed in particular to the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and starts off by sympathising with their difficult position in Germany at the time. The document laments, for example, that despite being guaranteed freedom of Roman Catholic education through a concordat signed with the German government in 1933, church schools were being pressured to close.

Apart from concerns about religious liberty, the document continues to lament the rise of neo-pagan ideas, and especially pantheism, both inside and outside the church in Germany – due to the propaganda of these religious ideas by radical members of the Nazi party. The document condemns those who practice a form of pagan-Christian syncretism as anathema.

The second condemnation of the encyclical not only relates to the role of the state, but also speaks to race and nation. The document reads:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

While the Pope here rightly condemns idolatry of the state, race, nation, or any other sphere of human existence, it is worthwhile to note his explicit recognition of their intrinsic value. He does not advocate the abolishing of the institution of the state itself, for example, when he condemns its exaltation “above standard value”. The statement itself presupposes the positive existence of a standard value (and function) for the state, as well as race and nationhood. In the 1930s the anti-Nazis were nothing at all like the contemporary SJW anti-racists that currently strive to make our societies unlivable. Mit Brennender Sorge recognizes the “order of the world planned by God” in relation to the existence and functions of race and nation – a clear positive appreciation of both.

This is followed by an admonition that all nations and rulers everywhere are to obey the Word of God without exception and that a state or party has no right to elevate itself above this level. The commandments of God are called the “necessary foundation of all private life and public morality,” such that “to hand over the moral law to man’s subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction.” One of the examples listed in the desecration of Sunday as a day of rest, which the document notes is also opposed to the best German traditions.

It continues to condemn the idea of a non-universal national religion by which a god is bound only to one particular people. An evident shortcoming of the encyclical is that it fails to elaborate on this particular condemnation, however, and omits any positive recognition of the uniqueness of the different cultural expressions of true Christianity among different nations.

The document thereafter defends the Old Testament as divinely inspired against some German heretics who wanted to do away with it. It defends the role of the church in a healthy society over against the overreach of the state. This includes, however, a classic Roman Catholic defense of the “primacy of the Bishop of Rome.”

The document is superb in its recognition of “the joyful and proud confidence in the future of one’s people” as an “instinct in every heart.”

The document concludes its discussion on the issue of race and nationalism with a clear articulation of its understanding of the place of nationalism in Christianity:

No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in a noble love of freedom and loyalty to their country. What We object to is the voluntary and systematic antagonism raised between national education and religious duty. That is why we tell the young: Sing your hymns to freedom, but do not forget the freedom of the children of God.

With regard to the discussion of race and nationhood, Mit Brennender Sorge is not without its flaws, but is valuable as a solid expression of the Christian understanding of this issue.

Modern Christians are obsessed with the concept of “human dignity.”1 This is a major topic of discussion and emphasis on platforms like The Gospel Coalition and the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Christians of all theological persuasions are stressing human dignity rooted in all people being created in the image and likeness of God as revealed in Genesis 1:26-27. That all people are created in God’s image is beyond dispute; the problem is that this fact is stretched well beyond its biblical application and intentions. The concept of human dignity is used as a pretext to baptize and sanctify humanist ethics on a host of topics.

A recent review of The Dignity Revolution by Daniel Darling published by The Gospel Coalition demonstrates the problem with the way that the concept of human dignity is being applied. Tina Boesch, the author of the review, states that the book addresses “political minefields” where she lumps “racism and white supremacy…eugenics, immigration…and religious liberty” in with other issues such as abortion, physician-assisted suicide, gender, and sexuality. The first group of issues is interpreted through a left-wing lens. This is obvious to anyone who has ever spent literally any amount of time reading The Gospel Coalition, but just in case you might misunderstand, Tina Boesch clarifies what Daniel Darling and other champions of “human dignity” are thinking. Boesch states,

The dignity of unborn babies is championed by the right while the dignity of the poor and refugees is championed by the left. But Darling asks why Christians should have to choose between recognizing the dignity of one group of people over another—politics shouldn’t be a zero-sum game. He invites us to suspend our uncritical alignment with one party or another and instead look at these issues through the lens of dignity.

Are we actually to believe that the Left is tacitly applying Christian anthropology to the issues of poverty and immigration? Are we also to believe that immigration restriction and infanticide are both violations of “human dignity,” the only difference being a matter of degree? What’s truly sad is that these questions even have to be asked! The proper understanding of anthropology and how the image of God in man is to be applied must come from what God has revealed about ethics and social responsibility. Instead of looking to the Bible, modern Christians simply accept leftist platitudes and bromides as though they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Modern Christians make judgments about what is right or wrong in light of “human dignity” based on how it makes them feel. Let’s examine two test cases of how modern sentiments differ what the Bible actually teaches.

Immigration and “Refugees”

Evangelical activism typified by the Acts 17 Initiative encourages refugee resettlement in the United States and throughout the Western world. We find this representative statement on their homepage:

Regardless of your stance on immigration policy or what you think about refugee resettlement, scripture clearly tells us that God’s sovereign hand is the one behind the movements of humanity and we need to realize that He is at work (Acts 17:24-27). God is placing the nations at our doorstep. Jesus instructs us to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19) and with immigrants, refugees, and international students that reside and continue to come to the U.S., we can easily get involved in His mission to the nations at home.

The Bible references give the impression that this statement has biblical support, but in reality opinions such as the one expressed above depend on facile interpretations that latch onto buzzwords without delving into the actual meaning of the passages being cited, or any other Scripture that might be relevant. It is extremely ironic that Acts 17 should be cited in support of an initiative to transport hordes of people across the globe when the Apostle Paul explicitly states that God has appointed national boundaries, and that this was done in part for the purpose of the evangelization and conversion of the nations to the Gospel (vv. 26-27).2 should live.”] Evangelicals infer that mass migration of non-whites into the West is a means used by God to bring about their evangelization and conversion.

I discuss this problem in my evaluation of David Platt, but stated briefly, this passage does not address all movements of people throughout history, but rather the formation of distinct nations and national boundaries in particular. The mass migration of unbelievers into formerly Christian countries is a manifestation of the judgment promised for apostasy in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. The Bible never suggests that “human dignity” establishes a right to live in any particular country. Deuteronomy 23 lists various exclusions and restrictions for entering the congregation of the Lord, which seems to indicate being incorporated into Israel’s body politic. These regulations differentiate between different groups of people, and everyone mentioned was created in the image of God. The implication is that Israelite citizenship (or any country for that matter) is not a universal right that is derived from bearing God’s image.3

The Death Penalty

The death penalty is another instance in which an appeal to “human dignity” is used to argue for its abolition. Recently Pope Francis has edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church to state that the death penalty is “inadmissible…in the light of the Gospel” because of the “increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes.” Support for the death penalty among evangelical Protestants has been gradually declining, with more and more evangelicals agreeing with the Pope’s reasoning. The irony is that the death penalty, at least in regards to premeditated murder is explicitly required because of the image of God in man, not in spite of it (Gen. 9:6). The severity of murder is grounded in the willful killing of a person made in God’s image. To withhold the death penalty disrespects the life of the innocent victim and pollutes the land (Num. 35:30-34). Jesus and the Apostle Paul explicitly affirm the legitimacy of the death penalty (Matt. 15:3-6; cf. Mk. 7:6-13; Rom. 13:1-4). Those who reject the death penalty on the basis of “human dignity” are ignoring what the Bible explicitly teaches about the nature of murder as a crime against the image of God in man, because capital punishment hurts their feelings.

Conclusion

Christians have embraced leftist politics and humanist ethics under the auspices of “human dignity,” which is supposedly grounded in mankind being created in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27). This is based upon a superficial understanding of the legitimate truth of mankind being created in God’s image, which is then pressed beyond actual biblical applications. Being created in the image of God does not exempt anyone from the consequences of their actions, nor does it give anyone the right to immigrate, permanently remain in, or become a citizen of just any country. The Bible clearly teaches the opposite. The result of this false understanding of human dignity hasn’t elevated mankind, but rather given legitimacy to globalist manufactured crises aimed at undermining the once Christian West. A false understanding of human identity is truly inhumane.

Footnotes

The title of this article is somewhat tongue-in-cheek – the point being that the Canaanites, whom God commanded the Israelites to completely purge out of the land, were also made in God’s image and thereby possessors of supposedly inviolable “human dignity.” ↩

The citation of the relevant passage from Acts 17 on the homepage of the Acts 17 Initiative omits any reference to boundaries and instead states that God determined the “exact places where they [the nations ↩

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah also make this quite clear. Nehemiah was the “man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel” (2:10) who told Israel’s foreign enemies that they had “no portion, nor right, nor memorial, in Jerusalem” (2:20). Ezra insists that foreign wives and their children be separated from Israel (10:1-3), with the result being the separation of the mixed multitude from Israel (Neh. 13:1-3). We can disagree on how exactly these precedents can and should be applied today, but it is clear that neither Ezra nor Nehemiah considered Israelite citizenship or residence to be something available to everyone on the grounds of being created in God’s image and likeness. ↩

In a previous piece I noted how resistance against tyranny is a demand of the counter-revolutionary worldview. I argued that the use of political violence was not intrinsically at odds with the counter-revolutionary position. In this piece I would like to emphasise how this can by exemplified with a concrete historical example from the previous century. In the birthplace of the Revolution – where the Enlightenment found its greatest manifestation – France, we also saw the establishment of the first profoundly counter-revolutionary state in post-Enlightenment Europe: Vichy France. This state, which lasted from 1940 to 1944, was instituted by the French Prime Minister at the time, Philippe Pétain.

Pétain was regarded as a national hero because of his heroics in the First World War. Once in power, however, Pétain immediately moved to make peace with Germany and dissolve the Third French Republic, establishing the state of Vichy France.

The Christian counter-revolutionary nature of the state was nowhere better exemplified than in its replacement of the revolutionary motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood) with its own tripartite motto: Travail, Famille, Patrie (Labor, Family, Fatherland). Pétain himself explained his counter-revolutionary opposition to the ideologies of the Enlightenment:

When our young people . . . approach adult life, we shall say to them . . . that real liberty cannot be exercised except under the shelter of a guiding authority, which they must respect, which they must obey. . . . We shall then tell them that equality [should] set itself within the framework of a hierarchy, founded on the diversity of office and merits. . . . Finally, we shall tell them that there is no way of having true brotherhood except within those natural groups, the family, the town, the homeland.1

A national counter-revolutionary program, ironically called the Révolution Nationale, was implemented on the basis of the ideology underlying the counter-revolutionary triad. Charles Maurras, an outspoken counter-revolutionary Roman Catholic, was the program’s ideological father.

Maurras opposed the Enlightenment as a negative development on the West and the French people. He rejected equality and democracy and favoured a royalist, decentralized state with a national Church as protector of the moral order. On an economic level he favoured the re-institution of guilds – a kind of corporatism as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism. His theory of integral nationalism stood directly opposed to liberal civic nationalism in its view of the nation as an organic unity, albeit with a strong hierarchical structure.

The Révolution Nationale followed this ideology and made the following reforms in France:

Vichy France serves as a prime example of how counter-revolutionaries practically acted in reforming their nation and state in a distinctly non-pacifistic manner. Pétain was a war hero and not one to shy away from a physical conflict. The counter-revolutionary program implemented in Vichy France was even called a “National Revolution,” which changes nothing with regards to its counter-revolutionary nature given its anti-Enlightenment epistemic and philosophical basis. Vichy France implemented this all in the midst of strong opposition both at home and abroad. Even though the French government was not violently overthrown, it was a revolutionary shift in political authority that the men of Vichy France defended with violence against loyalists of the French Republic. It is a good example of a major political revolution in the midst of a brutal war, and it has a fundamentally counter-revolutionary character.

Modern-day Christian nationalist movements, such as those in Poland and Hungary and those now emerging all over the West, may in the very near future have to actively intensify their resistance to godless leaders in Brussels, and they would be right in doing so. It is our duty as children of God to engage in active resistance against tyranny – that is, to not remain content with being mere sociopolitical critics and a witnessing voice for the gospel, but, if need be, to actively engage in building the Kingdom of Christ proclaimed by that gospel.

In his recent interview on the Ben Shapiro Show, pastor John MacArthur responded to Shapiro’s question regarding the biblical justification of rebellion against civil government, in particular with reference to the American Revolution:

Governmental authority is a God-given institution to repress evil and to reward good behavior. . . . They represent a God-given constraint to human behavior. And that’s why they need to be upheld and not broken down. So Christians don’t attack the government. We don’t protest, we don’t riot, we don’t start shooting people who are in the government, even if the government is King George from England. . . . We don’t start riots and we don’t start revolutions. . . . We live quiet – according to the New Testament, peaceable lives. We pray for those who are over us. . . . We do not overthrow them.

When pushed by Shapiro on the question of whether there was ever a justifiable revolution against a tyrannical authority, MacArthur responds unequivocally with “not in a biblical sense, no.”

MacArthur’s pacifistic rhetoric clearly hints at the Christian counter-revolutionary ideals of the post-Enlightenment era, but sadly reflects what has become a common misrepresentation of the classical counter-revolutionary position that emerged in opposition to the revolutionary political manifestation of the Enlightenment in France in 1789 and in many European nations in its aftermath in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. It is certainly true that the counter-revolutionaries valued societal stability (which worthwhile political theorist doesn’t?) and that it blamed the political tumult at the time on the Enlightenment revolutionaries. The theme of order and tradition versus chaos and radical change played a decisive role in their writings as well. However, this was only one argument used by the traditionalist counter-revolutionaries in the nineteenth century to defend their philosophical position, which was based in their understanding of the transcendent and aimed at something far greater.

The primary sources reveal that the fathers of conservatism had something very different from the evangelical pacifism we see nowadays. The counter-revolutionary position entailed, first and foremost, an opposition to revolution as an epistemic shift in the societal conscience away from the recognition of the transcendent authority of God, the Creator and Ruler of the universe, whose will is revealed in Scripture and nature. This epistemic shift has inevitable sociopolitical implications. Accordingly, societally disruptive events like the French Revolution are merely the consequence and manifestation of the real revolution, which already took place in the hearts and minds of the people. For the counter-revolutionaries, the “Revolution” they opposed was essentially epistemic antagonism to the teachings of historical Christianity and the nature of created reality.

Edmund Burke, for example, referred to the French Revolution as a “barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings.” This points to the philosophical nature of his opposition to the very ideas of the revolution as at the heart of the political tumult, rather than merely appealing for order and stability.

The Dutch Reformed counter-revolutionary political theorist Groen van Prinsterer, in employing the distinction between a liberal revolution and a conservative anti-revolution, could in turn positively refer to the Brabant (or “Belgian”) Revolution of 1790 as a Christian traditionalist political revolution, due to the anti-Enlightenment and therefore “Anti-Revolutionary” spirit that informed it. He explains the epistemic – as opposed to merely political – nature of his anti-revolutionary position in his magnum opus, Unbelief and Revolution:

By “Revolution” I do not mean one of the many historical events whereby in a given state the public authority is replaced by another, also not simply the tumultuous upheaval in France, but the entire change in thinking and attitude in the process of forsaking and scorning of the older principles revealed by Christianity. These revolutionary ideas are their principles of liberty and equality, human sovereignty, the social contract and conventional re-constitutionalization.

Understanding this requires one to embrace a radically different concept of Christian counter-revolutionary than that espoused by John MacArthur. Being a counter-revolutionary means opposing egalitarianism, licentiousness, abstract theories of law, human attempts to overthrow God’s authority, etc., but it certainly does not entail being anti-violence, nor does it always forbid the overthrow of those in authority. It is fundamentally concerned not about the authority and power of the government, but the authority of God. The Christian isn’t to stand by and passively tolerate godless governments when they rebel against God’s law – in fact, that would be fundamentally opposed to the counter-revolutionary position, because it would amount to a failure to counter the revolution against God’s authority. To be a counter-revolutionary in the sense MacArthur is advocating, is to confuse Marxism for Christianity. In the Christian view, the government is a servant of God, and servants are not to rebel against their legitimate masters.

There are, sadly, times in history where there are neither peaceful nor democratic solutions to very serious problems. In such cases, it is vital for the army of Christ – which is not for nothing called the church militant – to resist and, if need be, take up the sword against tyranny and injustice. In these unfortunate circumstances Christians have to act in what can best be described in a political sense as “revolutionary,” while remaining fundamentally counter-revolutionary on an epistemic level.

While we must always pray for circumstances to never reach such a point, one of the unfortunate scenarios which might require such drastic action is in formerly white nations where demographic replacement leads to the active suppression of white Christians as a minority in their own country. For dire circumstances such as these, it is valuable to revisit the Christian theory of lawful resistance against tyrannical governments as set out in the sixteenth century Huguenot treatise, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants).

In a follow-up piece I aim to look at the establishment of an actual counter-revolutionary state in twentieth-century Europe, which would never have come into existence, nor have survived for the time that it did, had it embraced the pacifism of the neo-evangelicalism of MacArthur and ilk.

With the annual celebration of Christ’s first advent upon us, believers will happily search the Scriptures to find prophecies of His nativity in the Old Testament. Churchgoers will hear songs and lessons of what the ancient Hebrew prophets foretold concerning the Messiah. At Christmas, we will recall the words of Matthew and Luke describing the scene in Judea nearly 2,000 years ago. The Roman emperor will order a census. Joseph and Mary will journey to Bethlehem. The Word made flesh will be wrapped in swaddling cloths. Wise men from the East will pay homage to the Desire of the Nations. The wicked, half-breed King Herod and his murderous soldiers will rampage through Bethlehem and make Rachel weep. Warned by angels, Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus will flee Herod just in time to hide in Egypt until Jesus’s later boyhood.

The blessed celebration of Christ’s nativity conjures up an ethnocentric scene. The sacred, holy words of the prophets are in Hebrew. Though written in Greek, the nativity story is an intensely Hebrew one set in ancient Palestine. The story of Christmas is about the Jewish Messiah.

As such, the season of Christmas can be an emotionally compelling time for less-educated Christians to sympathize with, or LARP as, Jews. It is also an opportunity for Jewish allies to manipulate naive Christians to contribute to Jewish causes, condemn anti-Semitism, and support Jewish political ends.

This article is a brief reminder of why that is both unnecessary and biblically unadvisable.

First, Christ is not only the savior of the Jews. In the wise men, and in the messianic prophecies themselves, we see that the Messiah was intended to save not only those of Hebrew descent, but those of all races who placed their faith in Him. As far back as Gen. 3:15 and 9:27 we see that God would graciously extend His covenant to us Gentiles through the Messiah. And the whole of the New Testament, particularly Paul’s letters, explain that God’s people are those saved by grace through faith, not by race. There are extensive explanations of these theological truths available already at Faith and Heritage. Some examples are here, as well as here, and here. Use the “topics” menu and the search engine on this website to find more relevant articles.

However clear as Paul may have made it, for centuries the early Christians had to combat Jewish violence. The Jews began this during the outset of the New Testament era by persecuting Jesus Christ and the apostles, as documented in the Gospels and the book of Acts.

When we read the Old Testament, we read of God graciously giving a holy Law to His people. That holy covenant was what Jesus spoke of in positive terms and what the prophets called the Israelites back to, over and over again.

The religion that the Jews developed during their time in Canaan, the Babylonian exile, and until today is not the same as what God gave to Moses and the prophets. The religion of the Jews is the pagan, syncretistic, immoral religion of apostates. The Jews turned away from God so completely that Jesus openly, repeatedly, forcibly condemned their leaders in the New Testament. In addition, those Pharisaic leaders have repeatedly lied about and persecuted Christ, the apostles, and every generation of Christians to the present day. They infiltrated both church and state to use them against Christians.

Thus, the love of Judaism is so inappropriate for a Christian that if a Christian had to choose between living among Jews and Muslims, under either the Talmud or the Qur’an, he would be choosing between a group that openly condemns Jesus and the Virgin Mary, (another source here) and a group that honors them. For as bad as Islam is, Christian Zionists should think about how bad Judaism is before cheering as Israeli Jews fire another round of American-funded rockets into Arab homes.

So too he should withhold his praise of the people who killed Jesus, who persecuted the prophets, who have violently assailed the Church through all generations, and who are the chief actors in the ongoing dispossession of white people around the world.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament messianic prophecies. Jesus is Emmanuel, “God with us.” This Advent and Christmas, let’s treasure the words of the Hebrew prophets, rejoice in God’s fulfilled promise, and share His love with all our fellow men. This is what we do. We are, after all, Christians — not Jews.

Christians have traditionally seen an imperative in Scripture which Rushdoony called the “image mandate” — that people should marry and reproduce according to their own kinds. But in recent years this “kind after kind” mandate in Genesis has been dismissed on the grounds that, as the Liberals tell it, it is a completely descriptive rather than prescriptive ordinance. Which is to say that if two things are biologically capable of reproduction, they are then of the same kind.

But this is a dismissal of the fact that the ordinance in question was leveled not merely as a matter of some mechanistic constant, but indeed as a command (Gen. 1:24) to the steward of creation — man.

Because Adam’s commission was to name (identify) variant kinds, prune back the thistles and vines from fruit-bearing trees, and nurture the telic order God had revealed in all the forms He had made: herbs of a leaf to their own bed, and the fruit of a tree to its own orchard. Yes, birds of a feather tend to flock together, but so too must they in order to exist; and to cultivate any particular strain, the husbandman must fence it off from others to facilitate its reproduction. In terms of creation and inbuilt teleology, description is consonant with prescription. Hence, intrinsic to the cultivation and maintenance of creation is a certain segregation of kinds. It was precisely with this duty of things to their respective orders that Man, as groundskeeper of creation, was entrusted. From this creation ordinance emerges the old chestnut, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” The alternative to which is disorganization, chaos, entropy, and death.

As it pertains to mankind, the principle would be punctuated immediately in God’s laying a visible mark upon the line of Cain to distinguish them from the children of Seth as “exiles” apart from Sethite society. What was this segregation of one lineage from the other according to observable marking but a demarcation of ‘kinds’?

But in the generations which followed, Sethites would violate this demarcation of kinds, spiritually and physically mingling themselves with the Cainites so that God sank the miscegenated world beneath a catastrophic flood, preserving the the last remnant of the Sethites, the house of Noah.

Upon disembarkment from the ark, Noah would prophesy that the lines of Shem, Japheth, and Ham were ordained to distinct and separate destinies (Gen. 9). In accord with what the Reformation Study Bible terms “the threefold division of humanity” (cf. Gen. 10:1-32), three corresponding continents were allocated to them — Asia to Shem, Europe to Japheth, and Africa to Ham. As we read, in the days of Peleg (whose name is derived from palag, which denotes division or separation) “the earth was divided” among the sons of Noah (Gen. 10:25).

Of course, the Alienists have recently muddled the clear meaning of the text saying, “It wasn’t ethnic entities which God divided at Babel, but languages!” But Genesis 10:32 refutes them directly: “These were the sons of Noah, according to their lineages, in their nations; and from these the nations were divided on the earth after the flood.” (Gen. 10:32) “From these the coastland peoples of the nations were separated [segregated] into their lands, everyone according to his language, according to their families, into their nations.” (Gen. 10:5)

Which is to say that while the division of tongues was the means of their segregation, the actual entities separated were peoples and nations. And the faultlines broke precisely along the tripartite division of humanity which Noah had previously disclosed as divine intent in Genesis 9 — a fact which the Alienists insist is mere coincidence. Or, just as often, they deny being able to see any such disclosure in Noah’s prophecy.

But this thesis that mankind is a monolith without subdivisional kinds within is, as they tell it, vindicated by a solitary proposition: that because Genesis announces all things to reproduce ‘after their kind’, and the threshold of reproduction we observe in nature is species, then kind is equivalent to species. And this, they insist, is the sum of its meaning — if an African Pigmy can breed with a Swede, they are the same kind; in essence, a biological argument for free love — if you can breed with it, it’s fair game.

Except the boundary between species is not always the threshold for reproductive viability. In some cases, hybrids such as ligers, tigons, zorses, mules, etc., are possible. But God’s law expressly condemns the cultivation of such hybrids when it says, “Ye shall not gender your livestock with a diverse kind” (Lev. 19:19). Every commentary and Bible dictionary I know of takes the position that this code declared the breeding of mules illicit. Clearly, since ‘gender’ in the KJV is tarbia תַרְבִּ֣יעַ(lit. to breed) and in conjunction with the word kilayim כִּלְאַ֔יִם(lit. mixture of kinds), the meaning is apparent:

It is indeed possible to breed between kinds.

Yet it is here expressly forbidden by God.

And the prevention of the phenomenon is delegated to men as stewards over creation.

The Alienist interpretation of ‘kind after kind’ is therefore refuted.

The second half of Leviticus 19:19 underscores the point — “Ye shall not sow your fields with diverse seeds”. ‘Sow’ there is תִזְרַ֣עtizra (the definition of which includes “to impregnate”), and ‘diverse’ is the same as in the preceding sentence, meaning “mixture or crossbreed.” And “seeds,” as everyone knows, is a concept applied to humans in Scripture no less than the plant kingdom.

This is not any Jordanesque “exegetical maximalism.” It’s the Pauline interpretation. For Paul exegetes the laws pertaining to livestock as primarily having to do with men, rather than cattle, and further intimates that everyone really knows this (1 Cor. 9:9-10)! No one would argue, after all, that Kipling was merely addressing horticulture when he wrote …

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf–
And the grapes be all one vine.

If Kipling’s words here are transparent as a pro-homogeneity analogy (and everyone admits they are), Moses’s are no less so.

Of course, Leviticus 19:19’s prohibition of hybrids corresponds to Deuteronomy 22’s proscription against unequal yoking, and contiguously with Deuteronomy 23’s various prohibitions on “bastards” (lit. mongrels) of various sorts. And the doctors of the faith have been of one opinion, acknowledging Paul’s prohibition on “unequal yoking” (2 Cor. 6:14) to have been based on said laws. In fact, Paul treats the question so holistically as to invoke the initial division of creation — “light from dark” — as the context for why Christians should be equally yoked in their marriages: because God has communicated His creative intent for His people to affirm the natural distinctions He has set in the world.

Before Paul, however, Isaiah also interpreted the aforementioned horticultural texts as bearing on the question of race and nation, describing “the rushing of many nations” as planting “foreign seedlings” which spells societal destruction (Isa. 17:10-13).

Hence the refrain issued to God’s people in all ages, “Be ye holy as I am holy; be ye separate as I am separate.” Inasmuch as the Creator/creature distinction is inviolable, so too is even the distinction between the members of the Godhead: though Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, we know their individuated personhood is an essential doctrine. Which, according to the thrust of the text itself, is the reason why peoples, nations, tribes, clans, and families are likewise segregated to their own co-ultimacies: redeemed mankind is designed for, commanded, and destined to, spiritual unity in ethno-familial distinction, and therefore some degree of racial segregation.

Apart from this vindication of a pluriform humanity, there is no coherent way to speak to the ubiquitous distinctions drawn between races and nations in Scripture. There is certainly no lucid address possible of Jeremiah’s reference to the Ethiop’s black skin as an analogy for evil (Jer. 13:23).

Apart from the traditional Kinist view, that as trustees of creation and our own familial lines we are obliged to pair kind only with like kind, we are left only with an incoherent lens over Scripture and natural experience. The miscegenationist ideology which has overthrown the churches in recent years presents an internally contradictory worldview, undermining all revelation, teleology, and logical operation of mind.

The passing of the baton to Gen X by Baby Boomers is underway, and our hollowed-out generation knows little of the stability that our predecessors enjoyed (and threw away). We have been grappling to make sense of the rubble we found ourselves in at the conclusion of two world wars, one ongoing cultural revolution, and several self-mutilating escapades in the Far East and Near East.

Leaders such as former pastor Joshua Harris and Sen. Kamala Harris (no relation between the two) have risen to tell us their respective views on what is wrong and how to make it right.

Josh Harris identified the problem as sexual promiscuity. His landmark 1997 book I Kissed Dating Goodbye framed the problem of sexual impurity in a larger culture that, to his credit, he decried as run amok. Josh Harris was correct in his critique of America’s ever-increasingly hypersexualized culture. He was correct to show that it infected the private lives of people within, and without, the institutional church. Statistics gathered in the intervening years have borne out his contention. Self-identified Christians consume pornography at about the same rate as non-Christians. Sexual abuse is not just a major public relations problem for the established churches, but a moral problem, a failure of self-governance, and a failure to understand their proper relationship with the state. The Roman Catholic Church has a problem of sex abuse by predominantly homosexual clergy on laity. Protestant churches of both the mainline and evangelical variety have similar problems. The seemingly simpler problem of hook-up culture had already taken hold in the ‘90s, and has only accelerated the degradation of Western whites since then. Harris wrote from this context, plus his personal experience with sexual impurity.

Thus it was that the young Josh Harris advised the world to kiss dating (and all sexual activity) goodbye until marriage. He urged relationships with the opposite sex only at arm’s length and via intermediaries such as relatives, pastors, and church youth groups. His solution was later twisted by many into a new form of legalism, and birthed a new form of sexual dysfunctionality. This was unfortunate, as his book was mainly intended to cure a form of sexual dysfunctionality by pointing people to a holy Christ who could give them purpose, love, and acceptance.

Like his Gen X peers and younger Millennial cohorts, Josh Harris set out to fix a broken world with little to guide him in the effort. Leaders of our generations are like handymen sent out to fix something with only a tool belt, but few tools. The cultural revolution stripped them of their tools. Old notions of race, gender, work, duty, country, and more went into the trash during the 1950s-80s. Half of these leaders’ job is to find some tools to use. The other half of the job is to apply them. The leaders of our generations have to hope to get the job done right, sometimes in spite of the tools used to do the job. Josh Harris came to a breaking point and decided that he didn’t have the right tools, and should quit his job.

In view of his recantation, if Josh Harris had to define the problem today he’d probably stay firmly within the boundaries of mainstream liberalism/evangelicalism: the problem is people not being nice to other people. Jesus would fit in there somehow, but the solution would be to act nicely to other people, and use state power to enforce niceness when people were unwilling to do it freely.

The issue with Josh Harris’s recantation and abdication from the pastorate is that it’s part of a larger pattern with post-Baby Boomer thought leaders. Without the anchors that Baby Boomers inherited from their parents, Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z leaders are building the plane while they fly. This isn’t a criticism; it’s observation of a fact. They either have to revert to older rules or synthesize some of their own. The solution to the problem of the fall of the West seems to be either a return to ancient Byzantium/Rome/Teutoborg Forest/Westminster or a drive towards some futuristic endpoint. The only middle ground is to wallow in the postmodern, individualistic, multicultural zeitgeist that presently dominates the West. That’s what evangelicals such as Josh Harris seem to be doing. An evangelical pastor turning to postmodernism, “humility,” and European-style socialism is apparently not just a cliche.

With Kamala Harris, the problem is traditional white Western civilization in all its forms (church, state, family, property, culture, etc.). The solution is Menshevik-style communism applied to race, gender, and of course class. Kamala Harris will never privately leave her left-wing, black revolutionary framework, but she will publicly evolve as situations dictate. So it always goes with this and other communists.

We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.

Once our generations fall out of the grip of leaders like Josh Harris, we end up in the hands of leaders like Kamala Harris.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

— “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats

Our generations have to do better than either of these options. To do that, our leaders must have an accurate understanding of the problem we face today, and the conviction to implement the solution.

The more severe the societal discomfiture, the more wistful becomes the nostalgia for a more halcyon time, and for all the seeming exoticism therein. As postmodernism established its ugly dominion upon a Great War-ravaged Europe, a population increasingly set adrift from its Christian foundations listened to the lies of its then-reigning Theosophists and looked for higher truths in the ancient paganism of Tibet, the last frontier sealed off from curious eyes. Closer to our own time, in the stagflation-laden 70s, a considerably more sedentary population pined instead for the surface trappings of the comparatively recent bygone days of the 1920s through the 1950s. It is remarkable that in the especially dismal year of 1973, one of the decade’s top-grossing movies, American Graffiti, owed its tremendous success to being a valentine on celluloid to the glories of 1962 – a mere eleven years prior to its release. It’s difficult for us today to fathom a similar elegy being voiced to that magical year of 2007, but we have been enduring a prolonged period of satanic societal stasis that is not comparable to the catastrophic upheavals those conservatives still around in the early 70s recalled with fresh horror.

So what are you supposed to do if you’re a doomed Millennial or Gen-Zer of a rightist bent, paralyzed in a generational cubbyhole so demeaning even Parker Brothers sees fit to mock you, via its new Millennial edition of Monopoly? (“Forget real estate, you can’t afford it anyway!”) You’re going to reminisce about your own perfect childhood, of course. And since many Millennials recollect their happiest days as being their infancy (if not their prenatal state), it only stands to reason they would embrace the 1980s, the decade that brought them forth upon an uncaring world.

Just as wistful young’uns in the 1970s could not be expected to have personal recollections of the 1920s and 30s, so too we cannot expect Millennials to have similar memories of a decade they spent, if at all, in short pants. Their perceptions of the time would naturally be colored by the period’s popular media, and by and large the media of the time was decidedly optimistic and cheerful, based as it was upon the last significant sustained economic upswing after the fabled boom years of the 50s. Murika could seemingly do no wrong, neither on the revisionist foreign policy front (as witnessed in the Ramboand Rockyseries), nor on the hedonistic ‘get all you can while you can’ domestic front (as promulgated by the ethos of Wall Street – no one remembers the ending when Michael Douglas is hauled off to the clink, after all). The most pressing problems seemed to be those suffered by the kids of The Breakfast Club. And if a chink in this rose-colored armor surfaced from time to time, as in the discredited lovable Cliff Huxtable persona Bill Cosby concocted for The Cosby Show, well, what of it? As John Milton so aptly demonstrated, you can’t have a Paradise without the occasional serpent showing up.

On one level, we graying Gen-Xers certainly can’t jeer at these tranquil reminiscences. In hindsight, it shocks even us to ponder on what was able to pass muster with nary a whimper in those days. Can you imagine a cinematic tribute to a (white) teenage militia waging a guerrilla war against invading Communist hordes a la Red Dawn‘s Wolverines being made today? (The atrocious remake featuring a hilariously unlikely invasion by North Koreans does not count, nor will it ever.) Or even more unlikely: a major motion picture featuring a black chief villain such as Conan the Barbarian‘s Thulsa Doom – especially when portrayed by an A-list actor like James Earl Jones? We have become so inured to the pervasive perverseness of hypersensitive homosexual heterodoxy that we marvel at the anti-homo gags that were still endemic in 80s comedy, in everything from the Police Academyfranchise to some of Eddie Murphy‘s best-remembered standup routines. ‘Clazy Chinaman’ bits were still prevalent (Sixteen Candles, anyone?), and no one wrote indignant letters to the editor about it, save a few irritable Tong members in San Francisco. Those remaining cultural tendrils of a civilization that once was even resulted in the ultimate unthinkable – Christian subtexts in children’s programming! It’s amazing enough that the comic strip B.C had a spinoff animated Christmas special that actually was promoted as such in the title, but when they had the audacity to depict the Three Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem at the end….well, it’s a far cry from the generic ‘winter solstice specials’ with obligatory winks to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa starring Shrek or whoever that pop up on Netflix these days. All in all, while the 80s certainly didn’t break any records for insensitivity, there was a definite laissez-faire attitude towards cultural mores that becomes very appealing in an age where you can’t prostrate yourself low enough in the mud to make a surface atonement for your antecedents’ past defamation of noble ethnic and gender archetypes.

Millennials and Gen-Zers, too, resonate to this mellifluous echo which hasn’t quite managed to die away just yet. Alas, that’s all it is and ever will be…a mere echo. As they cannot hope to recreate the seemingly recent past (it costs money, for one thing), they can only spew forth their admiration in the virtual-reality forum of the internet. And they do just that…in a fashion as vast as the Pacific ocean but as shallow as a birdbath. To cite just one obvious example: take a cruise around YouTube one day and wonder at the vast number of videos there dedicated to antique gaming consoles and obsolete A/V hardware formats. Or look at the insanely lucrative trade that is to be had from hawking Masters of the Universeaccessories – Mattel decided to hedge their bets by offering the decidedly Teutonic He-Man and his undeniably Wagnerian fantasy world on the one hand and corporate deal-closing Barbie and her gender-oblique person-friend Ken on the other. The youngsters also voice their support for the 80s in one of their more uniquely awkward fashions: via the dubiety of meta memetics. It is no exaggeration to maintain that there is an entire subgenre of memes dedicated to lampooning the notorious narrative ambiguity of Garfield, of which the random dadaist strips generated at the Garkovsite can stand as a suitable representation for the whole. Another such subgenre can be found which takes King of the Hill for its subject matter – which, though not an 80s show, certainly falls well within the mores of the decade. Didactic depictions of Hank Hill smoking weed, saying ‘DERP!’, or fighting Pokemon abound, but a more sombre affection for Hank’s pithy small Texas town brand of conservatism (liberally peppered with neocon affirmations of the integrity of the Bush clan for an extra dose of realism) can be seen in the popularity of the Facebook page ‘Hank Hill Nationalism’, which, of course, recently went the way of the original incarnation of Polandball thanks to the all-pervading vigilance of Zuckerberg the Just. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the alt-right’s ultimate rejoinder to SJWs: Chuck Norris, whose karate-kicking GIF files have come to represent the paragon of Caucasian badassery to a generation of young males sorely bereft of leadership within their own ranks – and this despite the fact that Chuck spent the majority of the 80s churning out Judeo-friendly grist for the Israeli-based Cannon Films corporation. Make no mistake: for all the political incorrectness of the 80s, the Tribe was just as firmly in control of all mass media outlets as it is today.

If all this pining for a 30+ year-old misrepresentation of reality sounds unfathomably futile, that’s because it is. Look, we all have fond memories of the simpler and more honest way of the world in our formative years. However, no lasting society was ever built on pop culture riffs. Had the kids of the 80s spent all their time idolizing the 50s, who would remember the decade today? It was bad enough that the boomers spent so much of those years pretentiously regurgitating their ‘idealistic’ 60s, and good luck finding memes dedicated to The Big Chillor thirtysomething. This current decade is unlikely to be remembered with anything resembling fondness by whatever snappy name demographers choose to call the children of Gen-Z thirty years hence.

More to the point, though, there is something decidedly unmanly about romantically pining away for this sort of thing. This is an activity more suitable to late-Victorian era spinster women sighing while re-reading Jane Austen novels for the 67th time. Are not Christian men called to be builders? I doubt the ‘neon god’ referred to in Sound of Silenceis the 1980s, but we certainly have enough people bowing and praying in that direction for one to think such things. A culture worth preserving is one that is built upon the solid Rock of Christ, not upon the jittery epilepsy of Max Headroom.

But it’s unlikely the Judaized, enmasculated, garbage-consuming alt-right will ever clue in on this. So here’s hoping the gently whispering cadences of Bob Ross lull them off into a nice long sleep. I have a feeling they’re gonna be needing it.